The Whirlpool

by Jane Urquhart

  No day was safe from him. Once, Fleda returned in the late afternoon to the sound of hammers bouncing from tree to tree. Three carpenters had just begun work on the carriage house which was to be situated just beyond the main building. Patrick and David had opened a bottle of wine in celebration, were toasting the building, the invisible house, each other. Patrick was standing in front of David.

  “Next year I’ll come back and you will have built it, a house, right here, where once there was nothing at all.”

  Nothing at all, thought Fleda, unobserved, though standing near them in the forest. Nothing, nothing at all.

  She would send him away, she decided. She would not let his betrayal slide away without comment. She would make an articulate summary of what she felt, what she knew had happened. She would bring it to his attention, his attention, and then she would send him away.

  The anger awakened her in the middle of the night, pounding in her ears. And the pain stayed, lodged in her throat, a piece of glass, a rusty tin can, a bundle of burdock.

  Corners were being introduced into her geography, accompanied by enthusiastic comments from the men. The building was a woman. “She looks good, don’t you think? Shouldn’t she have a back door too? She’ll be big enough for two good-sized carriages.” Pushing back their hats, they stood looking upwards at timber, at straight lines and corners, at the artificiality of geometric order. Fleda held on to the tent, even though she began to feel it was becoming extinct. A memory, a monument to another fading time.

  In the end she did nothing at all. She let him go and she let him stay. She did not speak her pain, her anger. She began to write small notes to herself, tiny, etched, painful lines on torn paper. These she hid in her long sleeves or in her corset. She recorded her dreams; ones where he was conclusively absent or conclusively present, ones where he appeared as a bird or a fish. She leafed, for the first time, through his book, vaguely noting a word here or there and letting no word touch her.

  She let him go. The man who visited had nothing to do with the other, the one in her dreams, the absent one. She was able, within days, to speak pleasantly to the man who visited, while mourning steadily for the one who had, as she perceived it now, completely abandoned her. This visitor was David’s friend, a man she could talk with but one she was closed to.

  The other in the dream house in her mind.

  19 August 1889

  I have read his poems over and over. There are no people in them, no emotion. Just acres of forest, acres of rock and unrelenting winter. I read them coldly, as if I were the grey, uncaring sky which covers the bleak landscape he speaks about. There is nothing there for me.

  “A common grayness silvers everything.”

  He tells David he will be returning soon to Ottawa. I tell a humorous story concerning David’s departure for the camp at Niagara when he was left in charge there three summers ago. He was obsessed by his spurs, though I’m certain they never once came close to the delicate flesh of his sainted horse. I, of course, packed his trunk… starched shirts, underwear, boots, collars, breeches, etc., and the spurs. “Are you sure they are in there?” he would constantly ask me. “Positive, certain, absolutely without a doubt!” I would assure him, over and over.

  Then the second I left the room he would throw everything out of the trunk in a frantic and panic-stricken search for the spurs which were, of course, there. I would repack the trunk and three days later we would reenact the entire ritual.

  I finally decided that he either didn’t want to go to the camp at all or he didn’t want to take his spurs with him. When I packed the trunk for the third and final time, I purposely hid the spurs in a bureau drawer, handing them over only when he was making his final exit out of the front door.

  As I tell this story Patrick laughs quietly. David scowls into the fire. But I know, nonetheless, that he is pleased that the anecdote I am relating is centred around him.

  Now I have come to believe that the trunk should be unpacked before the journey, rather than after… that its contents should be taken out and scattered to the winds.

  “Shop was shop only; household stuff?

  What did he want with comforts there?

  Walls, ceiling, floor, stay blank and rough

  So goods on sale show rich and rare

  Sell and send home, be shop’s affair.”

  R.B. Shop

  20 August 1889

  I don’t believe that Patrick is going to swim the whirlpool, though I will not ask him.

  All he speaks of now is the war, and when he is speaking he is not talking to me.

  David thoroughly enjoys this. They have both decided that war is an abstract theory meaning something else entirely.

  Patrick says that he totally rejects the concept of an audience when it comes to battle… that participation is all.

  David reminds him over and over that the future is the audience and that the future is the present now… so, he wonders, where is the audience?

  Patrick says that it is in the United States.

  Then they both laugh a lot.

  Still, Patrick sometimes goes down to scrutinize the whirlpool. I’ve been watching and I’ve seen him.

  Once when they were talking I read some of the last verses of R.B.’s “Amphibian” aloud to them both, slowly and with much expression:

  XI

  “But sometimes when the weather

  Is blue and warm waves tempt

  To free one’s life from tether

  And try a life exempt

  XII

  From worldly noise and dust

  In the sphere which overbrims

  With passion and thought – why just

  Unable to fly, one swims

  XIV

  Emancipate through passion

  And thought, with sea for sky

  We substitute, in a fashion

  For heaven – poetry.”

  Maud collapsed on the chaise longue in the sunroom. She was exhausted, completely exhausted, by the humidity. In the garden her zinnias drooped, unable to flounce their colour in this heavy air. Only yesterday the wind that had formerly moved the atmosphere around had abruptly stopped. Now Maud had the feeling that she was breathing the same air over and over, that it would never change, never go anywhere else. The thought oppressed her.

  She had sent the child off with the housekeeper, unable to cope with another moment in his presence. Unable to listen any more to what he had to say, for now there was something new. He had begun to fill up the adults’ silences with a verbal description of their actions, as senselessly as Maud’s former naming of objects in her external environment. Back when she still wanted him to talk. Very soon, she decided, the child would reduce them all, not only to silence, but to paralysis as well.

  Now you are climbing the stairs, he would say, struggling along after her. Now you have come to the top, now you are walking down the hall. Now you can’t remember what you came up here for. Now you are going into the parlour. Now you are picking up the mail from the tray. Now you are going back to the hall. Now you are walking back into the sunroom. Now you are in the sunroom.

  “You must stop this senseless behaviour,” she would shout at him, “there’s no reason for it!”

  “You must stop this senseless behaviour,” he would shout back, “there’s no reason for it!”

  “Now you are looking straight at the boy,” he would continue, “and you are very angry at him.”

  There were momentary interruptions in all this. The child had learned that language could be moulded into requests. But he hadn’t yet made use of the pronouns “I” or “me,” always referred to himself as “the boy.” “The boy is hungry, the boy is tired, the boy wants to go out into the garden.”

  “What is your name?” Maud once asked him in desperation.

  He had looked around behind him, as if to assure himself no one else was being addressed, then, “What is your name?” he had replied.

  She was astonished by the
extent of his vocabulary; even in a normal child of his age it would have been remarkable. But for one who had held onto silence for years, the variety of words was overwhelming. As though he had been storing verbal symbols in a special cerebral enclosure until it became so full it simply had to burst. He had drawn the world that circled him inwards, had hoarded snippets of discourse, and then all of this tumbled out of his mouth like a mountain waterfall after the ice on the heights has melted.

  His talk about the man persisted. Maud was beginning to believe that the child might be referring to another side of himself, as recently he had combined the words “man” and “mine.” He would become agitated at these times, running from window to window, looking up and down Main Street, whispering the words “man” and “mine” over and over, or occasionally shouting them at Maud as if he expected her to do something, to perform some kind of anticipated miracle.

  Maud knew the heavy air would eventually break… break into the true weather of this country, the safe cold when the river appeared to stop. Then there would be a pause, a time for ordinary funerals, when her little notebook could be stored in a dark drawer and the hall cupboard door closed.

  Outside, a few of the maple’s leaves rustled unexpectedly and then were still. Through the open window Maud heard the child talking to a bird.

  “Now you are going to fly away,” he said.

  Order attacked the child as suddenly, as unpredictably as any other form of disease, and he began to sort, to classify.

  Maud was surprised one morning to find her haphazardly arranged dresser drawers immaculate; gloves placed together in one location, stockings in another. The housekeeper could not have done this. Maud kept her own room, had always done so.

  At first she could not imagine what had happened, and tried to remember whether she, herself, in a distracted, preoccupied way, had actually performed the task while thinking about something else. She had lost objects in this manner, moving them unconsciously around the house while her mind arranged an important funeral, but never in her experience had she organized drawers… consciously or otherwise.

  Then she guessed it. The child; the child had done this, slipping through the house like a shadow. Vaguely pleased with this new facet of his behaviour, she decided to let it rest. No harm done, no harm.

  She closed the window in her room as she did each morning after a night filled with the perils of vapours, and walked through the doorway down the hall to the sunroom, the light of which burst easily over her as she reached her desk. Settling in, she opened the drawer to remove the accounts book. There, also, order surprised her. Seven lead pencils were arranged according to size in descending scale at the front. Beside them, two erasers, their pink tips and bottoms not a fraction out of line. Adjacent to these lay her gum-backed labels in a pile so regular it resembled a tiny block of wood painted red and white. Her several notebooks were piled, one on top of the other, at the rear of the drawer, like a miniature ziggurat, beginning with the largest account book at the bottom and finishing with the smallest (her collection of drowned individuals) at the top. Now she was beginning to become perplexed. An isolated incident was one thing, but what else had he been into besides drawers?

  She was staring into the many cubbyholes directly above the surface of the desk when she realized that the familiar irregularity of the papers she stashed there had also changed. All the envelopes (mostly containing IOUs) had been filed, again according to size, with the smaller ones occupying smaller spaces, the larger, larger spaces and the unclassifiable nowhere to be seen. The child had clearly taken it upon himself to dispose of these irregularities. If they couldn’t be sorted, then they shouldn’t exist.

  Maud looked around the room and noted, as she now feared, that its profusion of bric-a-brac was undeniably altered. Objects had been grouped together, classified somehow, though it was difficult for Maud to determine the criteria for these new configurations. Her domestic geography had been tampered with, her home had become a puzzle. The size classification that the child had so neatly applied to the desk was not in evidence anywhere else in the room. Instead, there were these innumerable clusters of small connected objects, some that had been in the room previously, some that had been brought from other rooms to complete a bizarre design determined by the child.

  The mantel, she discovered, was covered with cutting, shining things: her letter opener, a pen-knife, three needles from her sewing basket, scissors, a razor blade, which had somehow remained in the house since Charles’ death, and a piece of broken glass. A cherry sidetable, which normally held Charles’ photo, appeared to be empty. But as Maud looked again, it revealed itself to be covered with various forms of detritus: a dust ball, lint from a cotton pocket, a small amount of sand apparently from the driveway, and, most strange, a dirty, soot-filled spider web, found in some corner, no doubt, that she was unaware of, or perhaps from the workshops downstairs. There were ashes, too, probably from the cook stove in the kitchen.

  The photograph of Charles? She found it, after searching for some time, situated under the curving arm of the sofa, along with others of her parents, his parents, herself. These were combined with a variety of other flat human images; a paper doll, a steel engraving from Ladies’ Home Journal, and a framed lithograph, from the parlour, of a little girl staring out to sea.

  On the windowsill, the presence of a clear paperweight, the magnifying glass her mother-in-law had used to read, her father-in-law’s spectacles, and a pressed glass goblet confounded Maud until she realized that what they had in common was transparency and an innate ability to shatter.

  She wondered which had come to the child first: the fairly simple method of classification according to size, or the more complex method of classification by physical property. There were groups of objects, moreover, whose common denominator she couldn’t, for the life of her, identify: the thimble, pearl necklace, and spoon, for instance, or the playing card, chestnut, and emery board.

  Maud moved around the room in a bemused manner, taking stock of the situation. The appearance of objects from further rooms caused her to suppose that the whole house had been disturbed as much as it might have been had vandals ransacked it during the night. It would be weeks before her own concept of order was restored. Still, she could not yet become angry. Every time she tried, her curiosity got in the way. These strange little assemblings might be the key to the child’s mind; a garden she’d been denied access to for years. In her heart, she felt like letting him continue. Rearrange it, she would say, it might be better.

  On the bookshelf, in front of Great Expectations and Little Dorrit, was a collection of tickets of various sizes… just that, no more; a colourful collection of tickets. Nothing complex here. These came from the ferry boat, or the streetcar, or the opera house… a few from the Terrapin Tower of other amusements near the Falls. One was from a horse race. Maud shuffled them in her fingers, pondering their significance in the child’s mind.

  It came to her slowly, the origin of these tickets, very slowly at first. Then, the knowledge exploding in her head like fireworks, she turned and ran from the room, down the long hall. The child, she suddenly knew, had invaded her cupboard, her museum.

  This morning being Sunday, and none of them at church, they were sitting on three camp stools near the bank. Patrick had arrived early, his trousers soaked with the dew that had covered the orchards he had to cross on his route from the farm to the Heights. He had helped himself to the coffee that bubbled over the fire and had accepted an offer of bacon and eggs. He and David discussed and then rejected the idea of church, looking as pleased as schoolboys taking a day off.

  All of this is so innocent, Fleda thought to herself angrily. The men had a secret pact. They knew what they should do and they knew how to be gleefully guilty when they weren’t doing it. Never a thought that desire and duty could possibly mesh. Never a thought that the deepest desires were a duty in themselves. Somehow she felt that the men would either snicker or turn away in ho
rror from her intensest wishes, even though they had some, not unlike hers, locked away in some corner of their heads – in a place where she couldn’t get at them, and they couldn’t either.

  She began to hum hymns, quietly, and then with increasing volume, when she realized that neither man was paying any attention. They were discussing the war.

  “Did I ever show you the garden in Queenston where Brock paused to draw his breath, just before he scaled the Heights?” David was asking. “Just imagine him there, alive one minute in a flower garden, and the next hour completely dead.”

  Fleda decided to add words to the tune she was humming:

  Rescue the perishing, care for the dying.

  Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave

  “Why did he do it, do you think?” Patrick opened his hands earnestly. “Was it for the sake of a magnificent death? He must have known. Wouldn’t he have known?”

  “You have to remember,” David continued didactically, “that Brock would have had Nelson as a model and General Wolfe. These men were happy to use their bodies as targets.”

  “Targets?”

  “Um-hmm, a wonderful thing to do. After all, to aim at the leader distracts the enemy, if only briefly.”

  “Soldiers of Christ arise, and put your armour on” Fleda sang. And then:

  Leave no unguarded place

  No weakness of the soul

  Take every virtue, every grace

  And fortify the whole

  As a child she had memorized practically the whole Canadian Hymnal, it being the closest thing to poetry that graced the shelves of her father’s house. She remembered the shape of the book… its cover was oddly square and coloured an unpleasant shade of green.